Chapter 14 #4
He pulled Thomas’s hand down his body, the palm skimming senselessly over his chest, leaving nothing in its wake but the memory of a ripple of cold, then forced it beneath the waistband of his trousers and against his half-stirring cock.
Thomas’s fingers opened like a flower, curling round Micha, clumsy and eager and kind.
Warmth. Pressure. So much. So little. The rain pelted against Micha’s back and slithered through his hair.
The wind lashed at him and the cold numbed him.
And Thomas stroked him like he was touching something beautiful.
A gift, given to a recipient incapable of deserving it.
“Down.” Micha’s voice cracked like the lightning. “Get on your knees.”
He put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder and pressed. After the slightest hesitation, Thomas dropped into the mud.
“Get your hands out of the way.”
One last, barely there caress, and they were gone.
Micha tore his trousers fully open, seized his cock, and dragged it across Thomas’s lips in a smear of rain and pre-come.
Thomas looked up at him from where he knelt.
There was no alarm or revulsion on his face, just a terrible sort of trust. And, although Micha had told him to keep his hands out of the way, they were suddenly there again, embracing Micha’s hips, holding him close and steady in the centre of the storm.
Micha made a sound that was almost a sob. Then, “Let me in.”
Thomas opened his mouth and Micha shoved inside without kindness or finesse.
Heat, slick and soft, engulfed him. A noise, a breath or a groan, caught at the back of Thomas’s throat.
Micha stared down at him, shaking heavy hanging hair and wetness from his eyes.
Thomas was just a piece of bedraggled darkness, crumpled at Micha’s feet, wavery through a grey veil.
His gaze was intent on Micha’s, even as tears pooled in his eyes and slipped from the corners, mingling with the tracks already left by the rain.
Micha looked away and thrust. His hands knotted in Thomas’s hair.
Thomas made another sound, pained, wet, and breathless, and Micha ignored him.
The storm ran over them. Micha was sure he was cold, but he felt untouched and untouchable.
It was like fucking the dark, a hot, deep void.
He imagined running a knife across his skin.
He would bleed dust and rust-red petals that would blow away in the wind.
He had chosen his own god, and his body was its temple. He housed nothing else.
“Stop it. It’s no use.” He jerked himself away, fumbling with the fastenings on his trousers.
Thomas fell forward, catching himself on his elbows before he landed in the mud. He was a mess of rain and tears, spit and mucus. After a spluttering, gasping moment he sat back on his heels.
“I’m sorry—” he began.
“Don’t. Don’t. It’s me, not you, I can’t. I just can’t.”
Thomas came a bit shakily to his feet. His clothes had fared no better than the rest of him. He wiped his swollen mouth on the sleeve of his coat.
“Come.” His voice was raw.
Micha could have stood there until the storm consumed him. Until the wind flayed him. Until he was nothing but water droplets lost in the torrent. Except Thomas took up his hand and led him home.
Ten minutes later, they staggered into the rectory.
Thomas had to struggle to close the door in the face of the prevailing wind.
Then, apparently unconcerned by the mess he was making and the mud he was tracking everywhere, he hurried into the drawing room and began building up a fire.
As soon as it was lit, he sank to his knees in front of the blaze.
Micha stood in the hall, water streaming from his hair into his eyes and down his face. The rain felt as bitter as tears. His mouth stung with salt and shame. He yanked off his boots and made a dash for the stairs.
Thomas’s voice pulled him back. “Micha.”
“I . . . should . . . I don’t . . .”
“Come here, please.” It was not a command, nor really a plea, but it reeled Micha in like a fish upon a line, and, in truth, he had no wish to resist. He did not know if he could bear to see the disgust, recrimination, or, worse, the hurt in Thomas’s eyes, but he deserved them.
That, in itself, was absolution of a kind.
Perhaps on the other side lay freedom. From Thomas and wanting and himself.
How much easier it would all be now that Thomas hated him.
Micha stepped into the room like a convicted criminal going to his execution.
The warmth of the fire curled around him in welcome, and the pleasure of it was both irresistible and incongruous.
A long, deep shudder ran through him, his chilled flesh shaking itself awake.
He peeled his sodden coat off and let it fall to the floor.
“Listen. I’m sorry, all right? I . . . I’m sorry.
” He huddled down in front of the fire. Steam swirled up immediately from his clothes.
And the heat reminded him of Thomas’s mouth.
There was a long silence. The firelight gleamed on the arch of Thomas’s cheekbones. “I have wanted,” he said, finally, “to touch you for a very long time. But not like that.”
Micha closed his eyes. “I . . .” he started. But there was nothing to say.
Thomas’s fingers brushed lightly over Micha’s.
“I don’t want to be like this,” Micha muttered. “I was . . . I used you . . .”
“That I would not mind.”
Micha’s eyes flicked open, startled. Thomas was looking directly at him, and it was now impossible to look away.
“I think,” he went on, “I could have liked it. The act was not without power, not without beauty, and I do not fear to be the supplicant of your passion.”
It had been a long time since Micha had found even a fleeting trace of beauty in the base mechanics of sex. Even clothed in Thomas’s quiet conviction, the idea seemed absurd and impossible. “I brutalised you.”
“And I will not allow you to touch me in that fashion again.”
A cold, deeper than the rain, settled over Micha. Unbidden came the image of Thomas sprawled beneath him on autumn leaves, helpless, abandoned, and utterly his. Micha swallowed. “That’s . . . fine.”
Thomas leaned over and kissed his cheek with the ghost of a smile.
“I said in that fashion. You may be as rough as you need to be with me, but I won’t let you use me as though I were not there.
As though you sought nothing but pain and ugliness and emptiness in our coming together.
It seems to me almost a form of sacrilege. ”
“Sacrilege,” repeated Micha, with a faint, mirthless laugh. “It’s all sacrilege, Thomas.”
But Thomas only shook his head.
“You are such a stubborn fucker.”
He smiled. “In my way.”
Micha turned his gaze back to the fire, and when he spoke, it was barely more than a whisper. “I wish . . . I wish I was different.”
“You can be anyone you wish to be.”
“Don’t. It’s not that simple.”
“Well, as it happens, I have grown rather accustomed to you as you are. Even fond.”
“Fond?”
Thomas gave him a mischievous look. “Very fond.” He reached out and caught one of Micha’s rain-damp curls between his fingers, pressing out the water and letting the hair spring back.
“You may not be the easiest man, but you can be very kind when you wish. Very warm. Very clever. And very amusing. And I’m sufficiently superficial to find your beauty arresting. ”
Micha coughed, but he felt the heat rising to his cheeks. “I shouldn’t have . . .”
“No,” agreed Thomas, “you shouldn’t. And now I understand better of what may be done between two men, you may be sure you will not do it again.”
Micha dropped his head wretchedly onto his knees.
Thomas nudged his shoulder reassuringly. “I have as good as forgotten.”
“Have you, uh, forgiven?” mumbled Micha.
“Forgiveness is, thankfully, a problem for the Lord. And I shall remember with great joy the tightness of your hands upon my hair. The taste of your—” Micha looked up in time to see Thomas flush scarlet. “Oh my word.”
“Cock. The taste of my cock.”
Thomas nodded. “Precisely,” he said primly. “Which I hope to experience again, under more convivial circumstances.”
For a moment, Micha felt almost like he could smile. But it was still a little too soon, and the more Thomas tried to comfort him, the worse he felt. “I’m so sorry.” The words rushed out of him in a choked torrent. “I’m so sorry. If only there was something I could say or do.”
There was a pause.
“There is.” Thomas darted a sidelong look at him. “If you want. And only if you want.”
Micha wished. But he had learned his harshest lessons well. “What is it?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
“Perhaps you could,” said Thomas softly, “ask me again what you asked in the rain.”
“I can’t remember what I said. I said all sorts of things.”
“I remember. You said, ‘Make me feel.’”
Micha remembered only bile and poppies. “Did I?”
“Yes. And I should like to try. If you will let me.”
Bile and poppies and hopelessness. “I won’t spend.”
“That wasn’t what you asked.”
“Oh fuck.”
Unexpectedly, Thomas gave a soft laugh. “You said that too.”
Micha was so terrified he could barely speak. It was one thing to yield himself for money, but to do so by choice? Could he even recall how? Did he want to? And Thomas would surely be disappointed in him. This hollow shell of a man he found beautiful. “All right,” he managed at last.
But still Thomas waited.
Micha’s mouth had gone painfully dry. “M-make . . .” he croaked. “Make me feel.” And in case that was not enough. “Please.”
And the next thing he knew, Thomas was full-length on top of him, fire-warm, rain-damp, all long limbs, sharp bones, and clumsy eagerness.
His lips were on Micha’s lips, just long enough to make him breathless, then they were sliding down his throat, over his quickening pulse.
Thomas’s hands were tugging open the fastenings on his shirt, and Micha trembled in some awful combination of fear and reaction.
It was all he could do not to reach up and cover himself.
When he had been naked—far more naked—than this.
Thomas leaned over him and kissed his collarbones, his tongue lashing like flames over the ridges of bone.
His breath travelled over Micha’s skin like the glow from a shot of brandy.
Micha stared blankly at the moulding on the ceiling, his hands clenching and unclenching in the hearthrug. “You,” he said awkwardly, “you also said something.”
“Hmm?” Thomas lifted his head. His expression was dazed, his eyes as hazy as a man’s who had taken too much wine. His hand shook where it rested upon Micha’s chest, rising and falling with his unsteady breaths.
“Say it again.” Micha did not know if he was begging. He feared he might be.
“Say what?”
“In the lane. Say it again.”
“Oh.” Understanding flashed, bright as sunshine, across Thomas’s face, and then he smiled, saying just as easily as he had the first time, “I love you.”
“Again.”
Thomas kissed him, right over his too-fast, too-hard pulse. “I love you.”
The words enwrapped him like chains of silk, and Micha made a strange, mortifying noise.
His hands came up to cover his face, but Thomas caught them and kissed his palms, his wrists, his fingertips.
Micha’s blood rippled like long-stagnant water, freshly disturbed.
A tingle ran through the veins in his forearms all the way to his heart.
Thomas rose onto his knees, straddling Micha’s thighs, the heat of his cock pooling against Micha’s own, which stirred and ached, with dulled, half-forgotten desires.
And Micha twisted, moaned, and dared—just a little—to want.
Nothing more than this. No hope of more, no fears of less.
Simply Thomas, the touch of his hands, the brush of his lips, the sweet prison of his weight not quite holding him down.
Micha eased himself from Thomas’s grip. For a moment, he was at a loss for what to do with his liberty, and his hands hung between them like frightened birds.
Then he brought them slowly to rest on the thighs that enclosed his own.
Thomas was a lean gazelle of a man, surprising strength, a touch of gracelessness.
Micha traced those long, wiry muscles, feeling the responsive flex, like a smothered gasp.
A profane image came to him: Thomas wrapped round him in passion, the harsh embrace of his legs, the deep, secret heat of his body.
Thomas smiled suddenly, his eyes locked on Micha’s, and murmured, “‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.’”
And Micha, closer to lost than he had ever been, arched up helplessly into Thomas’s waiting arms until they were sitting, half-entwined, locked in each other’s embraces, and that was how they kissed, sweet and desperate, soft sounds and broken breath spilling from mouth to mouth, endless and unending.
In the deep darkness behind his eyes, Micha saw a world of undiminished stars.
“‘Behold thou art fair, my love,’” said Thomas, as they broke apart. “‘Behold thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.’”
Micha shuddered and dropped his head into the curve of Thomas’s neck, breathing in the scent of him, the warmth and the last traces of rain. His fingers dug desperately into the fins of Thomas’s shoulder blades. “‘Stay me with flagons,’” he muttered. “‘Comfort me with apples.’”
He felt Thomas’s lips against his temple and, between them, like an unbroken promise the steady thud of his heart.
“Please . . .” said Micha, asking mindlessly for something he hardly knew how to articulate wanting.
“‘Thou hast ravished my heart,’” whispered Thomas, drawing Micha with gentle fingers into another kiss.
And then came a beating at the door.